Congratulating A123 Systems On Its Very Successful IPO

John
Petersen

This morning Reuters
is reporting that A123
Systems, Inc. (AONE)
increased the number of shares offered in its IPO from 25 million to
28.1 million and sold those shares at a price of $13.50. If the
underwriters exercise their overallotment option, which is usually the
case in IPOs of this size, the total IPO proceeds will be $437.5
million before costs, commissions and discounts. This IPO has been a
long time coming but it was worth the wait. I want to congratulate the
A123 team and the underwriters on a job well done.

Assuming full exercise of the underwriter's overallotment option, A123
will have 104.1 million shares outstanding and carry a market
capitalization of $1.4 billion. The offering proceeds, together with
its pre-offering cash reserves of $115 million should leave A123 with
enough liquidity to finance the continued development of its technology
and provide roughly $310 million in matching funds for its ARRA battery
grants and its anticipated ATVM loan. Now it's all in the hands of
management to implement their strategic plans and bring an important
product to market.

The challenges facing the energy storage sector are enormous, but so
are the opportunities. I see an energy storage future where the
developers of every technology
we know about and many that we don't know about will have far more
business than they can possibly handle. It will be great to have a
bright line standard like A123 Systems that investors can use to
evaluate the relative merits and risks of both established energy
storage device manufacturers and emerging developers of new
technologies. I look forward to adding A123 Systems to my
list of pure play energy storage companies and covering its
progress in detail.